Brodmaw Bay (16 page)

Jack descended the stairs, thumping down them on feet as heavy as his heart. He wandered aimlessly into the kitchen. His mum was there, thumbing someone a text on her crackberry. She did that thing with her head, the gesture familiar throughout his whole life to her son, that shook the hair away from her face and out of her eyes. For the first time in his life, he wished that he did not love her so much.

‘What do you fancy doing today?’

‘Don’t know. Don’t care.’

‘Livs is going to a friend’s for tea. That gives us until early evening. I think we should take the train to Kingston and then catch a boat to Hampton Court. It’s a lovely day. We can have a picnic on the river and you will get plenty of fresh air to help mend that bruised brain of yours.’

‘My brain isn’t bruised. And I don’t feel like going out.’ His mum had grown up in Kingston. His dad sometimes made jokes about her being a posh Surrey girl. His dad was from a place called Moss Side in Manchester that apparently was the opposite of posh. Jack had been to Hampton Court before, but he had been about five and could not remember anything about it. Part of it was supposed to be haunted, but he could not remember by whose ghost. Probably there was more than one ghost, like at Hogwarts.

‘We’ll have a lovely time,’ his mum said brightly.

Jack looked from her to the fruit in the bowl, the substance of her earlier, playful threat. He saw that most of the pieces were bruising slightly, neglected without his dad here to help eat them.

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘Nothing is wrong with me.’

They walked to the London Bridge underground entrance on Borough High Street and took a Jubilee Line train to Waterloo. They caught a fast train to Surbiton and walked along the Mall and Portsmouth Road to the top of Queen’s Promenade and their first view of the river, the ancient island of Raven’s Ait right in front of them and then to their left as they ambled along the sweep of the promenade to the Riverside Café. Parr’s boats ran to Hampton Court Bridge from a landing stage more or less outside the café. Lillian Greer ordered a cappuccino for herself and a Pepsi for Jack and they sat on brightly painted metal chairs at a round metal table in the sunshine next to the water.

There were geese and ducks and swans swimming on the placid river and the odd cruiser or narrow boat chugged picturesquely by. The narrow boats had lots of decorative paintwork and polished brass fittings that gleamed. Some had plants flowering in lines of pots along the tops of their cabins. One was black with coach paint and gold, scrolled embellishments.

‘Pimp my barge,’ Jack said.

‘Would you like something to eat? Maybe a tuna melt?’

‘I’m not hungry.’

It had been obvious to Jack from the moment they got off the train at Surbiton Station that this was all very familiar territory to his mum. It was all a part of her early life, the part she had lived before he was born, when she was a child and then a young girl before going to college in London and meeting his dad. It was a mystery to him, this part of her life. But that was okay. It was a mystery she was perfectly entitled to.

They were both silent for a while. The café proprietor bustled around, greeting regular customers and whistling. He was really good at whistling, the way window cleaners and greengrocers were in old films on the telly, Jack thought.

Eventually his mum said, ‘How much did you hear?’

‘All of it.’

‘I see.’

‘I don’t, Mum. I don’t see at all. I thought we were a family. I thought we were locked on.’ His eyes filled with tears and his voice was choked off by a rising sob. Locked on: it was one of his phrases. He knew what it meant. He knew that his mum did too.

‘If you listened to everything, you know that I have ended it.’

‘You should never have begun it.’

She did not reply to that immediately. She sipped coffee and then looked across the river to the far bank. There was a towpath there of orange clay, visible between still trees in full leaf. Even through the blur of tears, it was a very pretty view. His mum had a little moustache of milk foam on her top lip from sipping her coffee. It was completely unlike her to be careless of such things. She became aware of it and wiped it off quickly with the back of her hand. She said, ‘Nobody is perfect, Jack. Neither your father nor I would ever claim to be that. People make mistakes. Both your parents have made plenty of mistakes. It’s part of being human.’

‘I googled him when you were dropping Livs to school. He’s a complete twat.’

‘I have made a mistake. It was a bad mistake I regret very deeply. I wish I had not made it but I did. I would ask you to think very carefully about how you use the knowledge you have gained about the mistake I made. And I would prefer it if you did not use that sort of language.’

‘He is, though. He’s a total twat.’

‘Yes,’ his mum said, smiling a smile complicated because there was no pleasure at all in it. ‘I rather suspect he is. But that does not excuse the use of bad language from a thirteen-year-old for whom I am responsible.’

The house on Topper’s Reach was a short climb through the village from the Leeward Arms. Richard Penmarrick turned up just as he had said he would at eight o’clock and breakfasted at the pub with James. They ate smoked mackerel fillets served on freshly baked bread and washed down their food with Charlie Abraham’s excellent and invigorating coffee.

The previous evening had ended at about midnight, fairly soberly. He had not driven to the Penmarrick house for dinner and he had not driven back. He had actually thought about walking back through the summer darkness but his host had insisted that this was not a good idea. He had not been specific as to why. Instead, James had been diverted into a relaxed conversation about Lillian’s art by Elizabeth Penmarrick and then Charlie Abraham had arrived at the wheel of an old Land-Rover and ferried him back to the pub and his room.

On the stroll to the Reach, Richard asked James about his liking for folk music. He seemed genuinely interested that a man who designed computer software for a living could have fallen for a genre so rustic and arcane.

James had never really analysed the reason for his partiality to the music he liked. He pondered on it for a moment. Then he said, ‘When you listen to Kate Rusby sing ‘The Recruited Collier’, you are transported instantly to the distant, pastoral England of the war against Bonaparte. The same is true of listening to Sandy Denny singing ‘On the Banks of the Nile’. She takes you back and you feel the grief and loss and hear the clamour of battle. This music makes a visceral connection with me. I think it does so actually on a genetic level. It feels familiar and intimate and right. It stirs my emotions. If you are English, this is our soul music.’

Richard had stopped walking to hear this. He began again. He said, ‘What does Lillian think of it?’

‘She thinks I’m melancholy by nature. She thinks I listen to the music that enables me to wallow easiest in the sadness with which I’m most comfortable.’

Richard laughed. ‘I’m with her,’ he said. ‘I like soul music, James. But my idea of soul is Marvin Gaye and the Isley Brothers.’

‘You’ll get on all right with my wife, then. She likes Curtis Mayfield and Sly and the Family Stone.’

‘Elizabeth sings.’

‘Really?’

‘If you are lucky, you might hear her sing tonight at the Leeward. There’s a bit of a do on at the pub. My wife is shy by nature, timid concerning public performance but if she can be persuaded, you are in for a treat. She has a truly lovely voice. Either way, there will be acoustic music, a bit of dancing and an opportunity to see some of the more colourful local characters hereabouts.’

‘Morris men?’

‘Inevitably.’

‘You’re kidding me.’

‘Why would I kid you? You’re not in Bermondsey now, my friend. And we’re here.’

James looked up. He was obliged to. The house on Topper’s Reach was tall. It was also physically isolated, occupying a walled plot approached by a narrow lane that divided into two even narrower lanes that flanked either side of the property.

The house itself looked more Tuscan than indigenous. It was three storeys high, constructed from a reddish stone and roofed in yellow tiles. It looked a little austere in the shade of the sun above the hills ascending behind it. It faced west and in the afternoon, James realised, would be bathed in light. The windows wore closed wooden shutters. They were painted green and had weathered to a matt paleness in the sunshine and the salt air. The wall around the property was about six feet high and right before where they stood was a high ornamental metal gate secured by a padlocked chain. James thought it all very handsome.

‘It might be a bit grand for us,’ he said.

‘And it might not,’ Richard said. ‘It might actually be a steal. Obviously it’s beyond the means and probably, if we’re honest, also the needs of the average Brodmaw native. And Brodmaw is beyond the reach of affluent weekenders from London. In the language of property dealing, this house is a bit of a difficult sell. That said, if you commit to living here, it might be exactly what you require.’ He took a substantial key from his pocket. ‘Let’s go in.’

The house inside was large and airy and bright and very empty. The rooms were generously proportioned and the fittings and fixtures modern but tactfully chosen, not a vulgar contrast with the fabric or character of the building. The specification was discreet but high. Both of the bathrooms were tiled in a dark green marble and in the kitchen a newly fitted Aga gleamed. James ran a knuckle along one smooth wall and it came away white with plaster dust.

‘The refurbishment has been done recently,’ he said.

Richard shrugged. ‘The salt air is unforgiving. Properties are well maintained or go into decline very quickly. It’s just a question of looking after one’s investments.’

It was odd to hear the language of an estate agent coming out of the mouth of a man with what James thought of as Penmarrick’s slightly debauched, rock’n’roll air. But he had to admit to himself that Topper’s Reach was very handsomely appointed. It was better than that, he thought, it was perfect.

‘Who lived here?’

‘Well, a few people have, over the years. The house has been here for better than a century, after all. It was built in Edwardian times. Its first resident was Adam Gleason, our ardent hero of the Western Front.’

James thought Richard’s tone, for the first time, slightly sarcastic. But he let it go.

‘Gleason lived here with his young wife and baby daughter. Of course the daughter never really got to know her father. He was cut down by the beastly Hun, hit by a volley of rifle fire in no-man’s-land when she was about four years old. Still, I suppose she had the poetry to console her.’

‘Shouldn’t there be a plaque on the wall?’

‘Probably there should. And if we got more tourists than we do, undoubtedly there would be. That said, Gleason has his high street monument. And he is on the county’s A-level English curriculum. It’s consolation enough.’

James looked around the spacious room they were in. Its walls were smooth and white. The oak boards of the wooden floor smelled recently oiled. Light bathed them in two lambent beams through a pair of large east-facing windows. They were mirrored by two facing west and he walked across to one of these and looked out at the view. The elevation made it unobstructed. Sea and sky stretched out before him to infinity. This would be their sitting room. They would be happy here. Better, they would be safe and therefore carefree.

‘Lillian will have to see it,’ he said.

‘Of course she will.’

‘And you have not yet told me the asking price.’

‘There is that to discuss.’

‘But speaking for myself, Richard, I do not see how it could be bettered.’

Lillian Greer barely kept it together on what she already knew was the most abject day of her life. What made it so awful was that it could easily be only the precursor to a period even more bleak and despairing. She could lose her family. Even that wasn’t the worst of it: the truth was she could have cost herself her family. Losing something was a passive and often blameless misfortune. She had been neither passive nor blameless in what she had done. At the very least of it, if nothing further occurred as a consequence of her actions, she had robbed her son of his innocence. She had disillusioned him.

Everything was recognisable and all of it was alien. She toured Hampton Court Palace with Jack, familiar with every room, every avenue of the ornamental gardens and each blind turn of the famous maze. Her surroundings were entirely faithful to her memory of them. How could it be otherwise in a place so rich in history it was almost sacred to those trusted to care for it? It was she who was different. She had been a confident girl and had grown into a confident woman. Now she was unsure of herself. She did not feel remotely in control of her own destiny. She thought the only thing that could have been worse was discovering one of her children had a serious illness with an uncertain prognosis.